With all the many human needs in our world, perhaps the most important one is literacy. Literacy is related to poverty, homelessness, health and family well being. The Jamestown Rotary Club helped support a short mission to Ghana in 2006 by Hannah Davis, an 18 year old Jamestown student who is attending New York University. She worked in an Orphanage and School and learned of the many needs related to health and literacy in this region. With the help of an organization for retired teachers, Rotary Clubs in Ghana and supporting individuals and organizations, the Jamestown Rotary Club is lending its support for a sustainable literacy project in West Africa. The project, which is in the planning stage, will attempt to address pressing needs for controlling malaria in a target orphanage-school, providing nutrition, pure water and basic sanitation as it develops a program for enhancing the basic literacy education of children. A donation of $10 can provide food for an orphan child for a month. Even a $3 donation will buy a mosquito net that can help protect a child from a recurrance of malaria.

Each day some 15,000 people die from water-related diseases. Indeed 2.3 billion people on the planet are suffering from a disease tied to dirty water. The major cause of infant mortality in the world is an infection or parasitic illness related in large measure to water quality. Diarrhoeal diseases alone account for 6000 deaths each day and most of these are children under 5 years of age. In several third world countries there are twice as many deaths from diarrhoeal diseases as from HIV/AIDS. Most of these deaths are preventable and the conditions giving rise to these problems are within our grasp to control. Rotary International will have helped rid the world of Polio with a campaign that began in 1985. In 2005, Rotary's Centennial year, the 65 Clubs of District 7950, through its Legs 'n Wheels event raised over $40,000 to provide pure water filters for projectsin Honduras and Cambodia. A contribution of $60 can supply pure water to a family indefinitely and relieve the life threatening illnesses associated with contaminated water for the children and members of that family. This is one of the causes our club and the clubs of our Rotary District support.